Escape
A man imprisoned for a killing he insists was accidental breaks free and encounters a succession of strange people and situations while trying to remain at large.
The Mercury Theatre on the Air was Orson Welles's 1938 CBS literary anthology, performed by the Mercury repertory company and remembered most famously for The War of the Worlds. Golden Radio Hour's 130-item collection includes core Mercury Theatre broadcasts alongside additional Welles-era material cataloged with the program.
Only 18 objects belong to Mercury Theatre on the Air proper; later items are separately profiled by historical program.
Names that turn up again and again in the surviving run include Orson Welles (performer, host, and radio adaptor), Bernard Herrmann (conductor, composer, and music), Ray Collins (performer and narrator), Dan Seymour (announcer and performer), Edgar Barrier (performer), George Coulouris (performer), and Eustace Wyatt (performer).
Across its run, the surviving broadcasts are tied to CBS Radio Network, WABC, WBT, and WRVA.
The stories often return to literary adaptation, war and military service, horror and supernatural, and aviation.
The show also sits in a wider radio history that includes Mercury Theatre on the Air launch, War of the Worlds broadcast, Campbell Playhouse transition, and Ceiling Unlimited wartime aviation series.
If you are following the same actors and creative circles, related programs worth opening next include Columbia Workshop, The Shadow, CBS Radio Mystery Theater, Suspense, and Theater Five.
Search this program or browse in its validated catalog order.
A man imprisoned for a killing he insists was accidental breaks free and encounters a succession of strange people and situations while trying to remain at large.
A dead carnival pitchman is permitted to return to his family years later, bringing a celestial gift and one final bittersweet encounter.
The once-proud Amberson family declines as social change and the arrogance of young George Minafer destroy relationships and hasten the family's fall.
A colonial administrator relentlessly pursues a fugitive islander just as a devastating hurricane bears down on their South Seas community.
When wealthy Roger Ackroyd is murdered in a quiet English village, Hercule Poirot investigates a circle of suspects whose carefully guarded secrets conceal the truth.
A woman searching for spiritual peace in the Sahara falls in love with a mysterious man whose past is shadowed by a sacred vow he has broken.
A retired American industrialist and his wife travel through Europe, where their very different hopes for the future expose deep fractures in their marriage.
Four Western travelers are stranded in the Himalayas and discover Shangri-La, a hidden refuge whose timeless serenity challenges everything they expected to return to.
A woman's lifelong love for her reckless cousin is tested by family tragedy, an impulsive marriage and her husband's devastating mental decline.
A detective's seemingly scatterbrained wife becomes entangled in two murders and unexpectedly reaches the answers before her exasperated husband does.
Miserly Ebenezer Scrooge is visited by the ghost of Jacob Marley, who warns that three spirits will come to confront him with the consequences of his life.
An ambitious social climber maneuvers through nineteenth-century English society, using charm and manipulation in pursuit of status and wealth.
A proper small-town woman secretly authors a scandalous bestseller, and an unexpected romance pushes her toward openly embracing the life and identity she has hidden.
An idealistic young physician fights medical corruption first in a Welsh mining community and later among London's wealthy patients, struggling to preserve his principles.
A runaway heiress and a cynical reporter are forced into a cross-country journey together, where their constant clashes gradually give way to an unexpected bond.
The formidable matriarch of a celebrated theatrical family struggles with ambition, family legacy, and a secret she has carried throughout her life.
A small-town man unexpectedly inherits a fortune and is thrust into cynical New York society, where a reporter assigned to ridicule him begins to see him differently.
Daredevil mail pilots at an isolated South American airfield face lethal flying conditions, personal grief and a hard-driving boss as a stranded woman becomes drawn into their world.
An American captain looks back on the Revolutionary War, including Benedict Arnold's early heroism and the personal conflicts surrounding the campaign.
A husband's family exposes the possessive control his wife exerts over their home and marriage, forcing a confrontation and a decisive choice.
Huck Finn flees his abusive father and travels down the Mississippi with the runaway Jim, meeting swindlers, danger and adventure along the way.
A small-town lyricist finds sudden success in New York and becomes caught between a calculating new romance and the loyal girl he left behind.
A young governess falls in love with her enigmatic employer, only to uncover a dark secret that threatens the future they hoped to share.
H. G. Wells and Orson Welles discuss the famous War of the Worlds radio panic and exchange ideas about science fiction and the future.
A non-cleared trial recording of Ceiling Unlimited devoted to the Flying Fortress. It opens with the true story of a badly damaged American bomber that survives repeated fighter attacks and…
A Ceiling Unlimited wartime feature devoted to the Flying Fortress. Welles combines the account of an American bomber surviving devastating combat damage with a dramatized tour in which Leonardo da…
A wartime Ceiling Unlimited feature uses three elderly veterans debating a radio report to explain the growing importance of military air transport. Their argument moves from Civil War memories and…
A Ceiling Unlimited wartime feature follows ordinary American Carl Jones from civilian life into training as an aerial navigator. While the women at home take on their own war work,…
A dramatized aviation feature based on Antoine de Saint-Exupery's Wind, Sand and Stars, centered on Henri Guillaumet's survival after crashing in the Andes. Guillaumet describes walking for days through snow,…
A Ceiling Unlimited wartime factory feature takes listeners through aircraft production by talking with the men and women doing the work. Welles moves among workers from different backgrounds as they…
Military officers struggle to explain reports of gremlins sabotaging Allied aircraft until pilot Lieutenant Messler describes being tormented by a hammer-wielding gremlin named Clarence. Messler's Irish sweetheart suggests the creatures…
A Ceiling Unlimited documentary-drama about long-distance aviation and Pan American's role in building a global air-transport network. The broadcast uses wartime voyages and crew recollections to discuss navigation, the international…
Edward G. Robinson narrates a wartime documentary-drama about the Allied anti-submarine patrol protecting Atlantic sea lanes. The broadcast follows a patrol aircraft searching a prescribed sector, locating a German U-boat…
A lifelong pilot's story begins with childhood experiments in flight and carries through service with the Lafayette Escadrille in the First World War, barnstorming and the creation of a small…
A mother reads the brief, matter-of-fact letters sent home by her son Carl, a military pilot, while imagining the experiences he leaves out. She remembers him as an ordinary young…
A wartime anthology built around the human meaning of aviation. One section follows Mrs. James waiting through the night for her husband's overdue bomber while an RAF rigger talks with…
A wartime Ceiling Unlimited discussion of what Americans should build after victory rather than a conventional drama. The program imagines postwar aviation shrinking distances, then broadens into questions of housing,…
In Hell, the Devil summons Philip II, Louis XIV, Napoleon and Kaiser Wilhelm to compare their failed attempts to dominate the world with Hitler's campaign. He boasts that modern aircraft,…
A magazine-style wartime Ceiling Unlimited broadcast organized around what Americans are saying, singing, reading and learning from the war. It combines commentary, music, aircraft-production news and a comic soldier's diary…
In wartime Yugoslavia, starving partisans hide from German patrols while one of the men thinks about the child he may never live to see. He writes a letter for his…
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